In automotive engineering, trim bars or strips are often used as trim parts for covering various recesses, ditches, gaps, channels, joints, or grooves in or on a vehicle body. For example, channel-shaped welding grooves between structural components of the vehicle body may be covered by means of trim strips or the like. In general, joint transitions between body parts or panels may be masked, i.e. closed or covered, by the use of trim bars, e.g. in the region of a vehicle roof, vehicle doors and/or mudguards, and so on. Such trim bars function both as a covering and protective element and as a decorative design component for the exterior design of a motor vehicle.
Trim bars are often configured as elongated, narrow strips comprising an approximately C-shaped cross-section. When assembly is performed, such a trim bar may be slid in and/or inserted into a channel, and latched into mounting brackets provided for this purpose. The legs of the C-shaped trim bar may be used as receiving pockets for complementary shaped latching arms or latching hooks of an appropriate mounting bracket. The mounting brackets themselves may, on the other hand, engage, on the vehicle body side, in corresponding wall openings of the vehicle within the channel. Normally, such mounting brackets also function as spacers within the respective channel in order to ensure a pressure-resistant and precisely fitting cover of the channel when using the trim bar.
A typical assembly process involves the installation of a large number of such spacers in a vehicle channel before the assembly of the trim may even start. This not only increases the throughput time in production, but also causes possible assembly inaccuracies during installation to due to the complex structure.